How to Restructure, Improve, Enhance a Country: Build Better!

A Commitment

Monolithic is committed to helping any country rebuild itself. Working with Domes for the World (DFTW), we stand prepared to act as a consultant and/or a supplier of any or all items needed to create housing, government and commercial facilities and infrastructure.

When you first begin really looking into current living conditions worldwide, what you hear and read appears overwhelmingly staggering – a situation impossible to correct or even improve.

We do not believe that. For one, it’s too easy – too easy to just look at the bigness and give up. Secondly, we do believe we have solutions: 21st Century technology. We know it’s practical and we believe it’s doable.

Shelters

A June 2010 Conference of the UN Centre for Human Settlements reported that our planet now includes 100 million homeless – mostly women and children. And the problem is not just homelessness. At least 600 million people, in developing world cities, live in shelters that are life threatening or health threatening. Every day some 50,000 die as a result of poor shelter, polluted water and inadequate sanitation.

Obviously, as great as the need is for shelter, building inadequate ones is costly in terms of both human life and money.

We are defining shelter as permanent housing that meets basic human needs. But in some cases, our shelters may be more than basic. We recognize the fact that a society may need housing that ranges from basic to prestigious.

Years ago the United Nations determined that a family of up to eight needed a dwelling with a floor area of just 28 square meters. Then too, visitors from China have told me that a house for a family of eight only needs to be 8 ping. One ping equals an area of 6 feet by 6 feet, half for sleeping and half for your valuables.

It turns out that both the UN and China use the same-size building. We also use that number: 28 square meters. Consequently, one of our domes with a diameter of 20 feet or 6 meters nets a 28-square-meter structure.

Obviously, many people would feel abused if they were allocated such a small structure, but millions of others would feel like they had just hit the jackpot with a good home of that size.

And again, a country probably will include a variety of homes – elaborate ones for rulers and the rich, more modest ones for officials and government employees. But the greatest, most immediate need is for shelters of 28 square meters, that are clean, easily maintained and have the strength to withstand natural disasters, rot and infestation.

Other Structural Needs

In addition to housing, a country in the process of being built or rebuilt needs infrastructure. That includes medical clinics and hospitals, schools, government facilities, manufacturing plants, warehouses, sewage treatment plants, waste reclaim plants, drinking water, irrigation water, electrical systems, communication systems, transportation systems, roads.

Grow Domes are also a priority. Grow Domes are designed to grow food inside the dome, using LED lights. They are equally effective in any location, climate or weather and are the the 21st Century method for growing vast quantities of food. Grow Domes can be built from the Arctic to the equator and their crop cycles can be anything desired.

Our Changing World

We are seeing changes in the lifestyles of our world. In 2011, our planet’s population is seven billion people. The projected figure for 2045 – 34 short years from now – is nine billion. By 2045, we will need a whopping 70% more food. That calls for new technology and new ways.

We need 21st Century technology for creating needed structures, growing food, desalinizing and taking better care of our water, more carefully husbanding our fuels, energy and resources. It’s all doable but not with the old ways. We have outgrown them. It’s time for the new ways.

We do not propose, for a second, that Monolithic knows all the answers, but we do know a lot of the answers, and we would sure like to help implement the move into the 21st Century. We want better lives for ourselves and all who populate this Earth we share.

At first glance, when you drive up to what you think is Al Schwarz’s Monolithic Dome home in Ferris, Texas, what you see is a door, sticking up inside a concrete arch, that’s covered with rocks and surrounded by more rocks. “Is that the entrance?” you wonder. Once through that door, you go down a slate staircase that spirals over an aquarium and down into the main dome with living, dining and kitchen areas. You are underground — literally standing inside a hill — but if you hadn’t gone through that door and down those stairs, you wouldn’t know it. It’s comfortably cool and light inside this dome that’s inside of a hill — like being inside any quiet, nicely lighted, restful, Monolithic Dome home.

A Monolithic Dome Workshop is a combination of hands-on training and classroom instruction. Equal time is given to studying dome construction principles in a classroom setting and to applying those principles by actually building a Monolithic Dome.

Being the coinventor of the dome and the founder of the Monolithic Dome Institute has given David B. South the opportunity to not only fine tune the building process, but to create a company whose main mission is to make available Monolithic Dome technology to all the world. It is the hope of Monolithic to educate the public about Monolithic Domes and to provide professional services to its customers by creating a successful partnership with them through all phases of their dome design, planning and construction.